Donated bounty helps schools innovate
When Joe Truss took over two years ago as principal at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, he looked at the classrooms, with their slide-in-sideways wooden desks organized in rows, and thought they evoked the 1950s more than the 21st century.
He knew he couldn’t justify spending his school budget on new furnishings, but then he got a check — $100,000, with no strings attached — that was part of a massive infusion of philanthropic cash into the district’s middle schools. Truss went shopping.
The money was part of what has become an annual donation to San Francisco and Oakland public schools by Salesforce.org, the nonprofit arm of the cloud computing company. And this year, the foundation is pouring another $12.2 million into the two districts, bringing the five-year total to nearly $35 million.
Marc Benioff, the Salesforce founder and chief executive, plans to announce the newest round of grants Tuesday.
“It is a game-changer,” said San Francisco Superintendent Vincent Matthews.
It is the fifth year of funding
for San Francisco, which is getting $7 million this year, and the second year for Oakland, which will receive $5.2 million. For San Francisco, the donations mark the largest private investment into the schools, district officials said.
So far, the Salesforce.org money has gone into broad efforts to improve technology available to students, boost opportunities in computer science and ramp up resources for recent immigrants who often lack English-language skills, among other initiatives.
San Francisco officials say the infusion has pushed half of all middle school students to take computer science this year, up from 0.5 percent just five years ago. In addition, the district has focused heavily on improving math instruction, including reducing class sizes in eighth-grade courses and providing coaches in Algebra I classes.
While the state is not expected to release standardized test results until later this month, district officials say middle school math scores continue to rise. In addition, the percentage of ninth-graders forced to repeat Algebra I has dropped to 5 percent, down from 43 percent in 2013.
Salesforce.com employees will also continue to volunteer at the schools, officials said, giving 40,000 hours this year in San Francisco and Oakland, double last year’s amount. Company co-founder Parker Harris painted the Visitacion Valley Middle School playground the day before school started, said Ebony Frelix, senior vice president of philanthropy and engagement at Salesforce.org.
Benioff calls the $100,000 that Salesforce.org gives to each of the districts’ middle school principals the Principal’s Innovation Fund. In the world of education philanthropy, it’s rare to see so much money handed over with no strings attached.
“The principals are the CEOs of their schools,” Frelix said. “They know what the teachers need; they know what the children need.”
Still, Benioff, worth an estimated $4 billion according to Forbes, likes hearing how they’re spending it. On a recent evening, less than three weeks into the school year, he gathered the 34 middle school principals from the two districts on the 30th floor of a Salesforce.com high-rise and handed them a microphone. For more than two hours, they described their purchases.
At Denman Middle School in San Francisco, the money bought a coding class and a television studio. At Montera in Oakland, every student is now taking a semester of Spanish and a semester of Mandarin before choosing which language to pursue further.
At Roots International Academy in Oakland, the principal created a bicycle shop, where students design and repair bikes, and paid for field trips, including one to see giant redwood trees. At Frick Impact Academy, Oakland students get an extra math class and tutoring every day, and at Aptos Middle School in San Francisco there is a maker space and ethnic studies classes.
Benioff stayed past 7 p.m. listening to the principals, and after he walked away from the meeting, he said he needed to figure out how to get them more than $100,000 each year so they could take more chances.
“It’s what we do in our industry,” Frelix said. “We understand iteration, we understand failing, we understand piloting. That’s part of what you get with this entire program.”
At Visitacion Valley, two years and $200,000 since Truss first went shopping, the teachers’ lounge looks like a hip cafe with coffeemakers, microwaves and couches. Down the hall, there’s an activity room — often tapped as a reward for students — featuring a pingpong table, foosball and air hockey. In many classrooms, old-fashioned rows have given way to clusters of oddly shaped tables that fit together like puzzle pieces, surrounded by a few standing desks.
The design and decor now resemble a high-tech office.
“It should look like Google and Facebook and Salesforce,” Truss said.
His students agree. The new decor is modern and cool, said eighth-grader Sara Carranza.
“It looks better than the old furniture,” she said.
With the Salesforce money came “freedom,” Truss added, saying he also bought microwaves to make teachers’ lives easier, a trip for 50 kids to Yosemite, a reading program and a meditation expert to teach students self-calming techniques.
He noted that at Salesforce. com, employees enjoyed a free coffee bar.
“We’re not at free coffee yet,” he said, laughing. But it is still a far cry from 1950.